SocialTech

Digital Communities & Digital Identities

Most of my week was taken up presenting, hosting, and having a huge deal of fun at the Emerge project three day online conference, Digital Communities and Digital Identities. I lead on the programming for the event,& recruited many of the speakers, so it wasn't altogether surprising that I really enjoyed myself. The quality of the session content, speakers, and participant contributions exceeded even my high expectation though. I'm going to blitz through some of the sessions here, linking to resources on an ongoing basis (not everything is up yet) and inviting additional linkfo where people want to contribute them. Also, a quick reminder that following the ol Emerge tag convention, we went with jiscemerge0408. We used three primary environments: Elluminate (java based online conferencing software) for synchronous activities, Moodle (open source virtual learning environment) for asynchronous activity and conference co-ordination, and Second Life (multi-user virtual environment), for the conference social. We also used a host of other tools for specific tasks - twitter, wikis, media players, and the Emerge main site (a social networking platform), primarily for blogging.

You can see a visual record of the conference here. I tried to record as I went along, using screen shots of the presenters on cam. A very simple solution to creating a visual record of the online conference, but I can't say I've really seen it used at other online events.

What were my conference highlights? One of the big things that hit home for me at this conference was the definite sense of community belonging. Certainly, community members have a very diverse experience of and understanding of Emerge, and it's primarily (as Graham Attwell noted) a community of interest. Although the Emerge 'border policy' has been a semi-permeable and pragmatic one, our majority of our members are primarily associated with two funding rounds, designed to support innovation and user engagement in the UK post-compulsory education sector.   

However, the more important understanding that really hit home for many of us at this particular conference is the appreciation of Emerge as a community of cultural and social practice. Graham Attwell and Stephen Warburton will doubtless add to this far more graciously shortly. For me, the conference really highlighted the business of serious fun and how conductive and essential providing an relaxed, comfortable environment where people were able to express themselves, take risks and reach out. Knowing that you are part of a community which is interested in your work, sympathetic and alert too the problems and contexts you operate in, and basically on your side, can operate as a critical safety net, fostering creative risk taking and collaboration.  I'm not talking about blandly sycophantic  agreement here either. Meaningful friendship involves critical engagement - people who care enough and are interested enough to say things that might be challenging. It's difficult to have and engage openly in critical conversation - but ignoring it and hoping it will go away is a childish, disrespectful strategy which will eventually bite you in the ass.

A fun illustration of this was the revival of Frances Bell's community beard meme, originally coming from a funny critical post on the the prevalence of beards in the community  commenting on the gender imbalance of the visible community. Frances is an consummate expert in being a critical friend, and partly what I'd like to see actively cultivated in the community is  an environment that allows constructive criticism to be given and received non-threateningly.

George Siemens delivered a great keynote on Technology and Community as Identity, and raised a lot of themes which continued to resonate throughout the three days. So hats off George - you're a great keynote speaker!

Brian Kelly's session on Developing a sustainable approach to the use of web 2.0 was a masterclass in service design and management, summing up where we currently are in terms of institutional, legal and ethical terms regarding using third party services to support learners in formal education.

The Emerge Bizarre launch (mp3 file)- that went out as a live radio show - was a triumph of content and production values, and includes some interviews with a couple of our projects. Great use of CC licensed music and a big kick to us to used multimedia more effectively in future.

The ARGOSI and HABITAT projects community slot - presented by D.H. Lawrence and two ladyz also wearing rather fetching beards - The User experience of Virtual Worlds was very interesting and exciting. I'm particularly in love with the ARGOSI project which seems to be inspired by 80's TV programme The Adventure Show (which I loved! Please send me a link someone!). I'll add more detail and links to this shout out shorty.

What Not to Rez - our fashion show social on Second Life was something that I really enjoyed too - you can check out the Flickr show link at the top of the post for pictures of me in my monster-truck proportioned frock.

Eduspaces says goodbye

Just got the email from Curverider announcing the Eduspaces closure:

Hi All,

We would like to inform all users 
of EduSpaces that we will be shutting 
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism 
for you to export all your blog 
posts in either an RSS format or 
HTML. To do this, go to your blog 
and select the submenu option 
you require. For those of you 
with files, you might want to 
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone 
who has supported EduSpaces 
over the last three years.
 
Best regards,
 
The EduSpaces team

It's no huge surprise (amongst other indicators Dave and Ben both moved out of Eduspaces a while ago), although I had hoped they would find someone to take the site over, and I can't say that I'm not sad to see the site go. Eduspaces and the Curverider team have provided a really important service, and an even more important model for the international education sector - demonstrating how web 2.0 and social technologies can be used to support learning and teaching, and showing the world what a learner-centric system might look like.

When communities collied

I'm not a massive fan of the CSI franchise (although my mum is, and I play Horatio signature poses bingo with her sometimes) but I was interested to see what CBS and Cisco had set up around episode #405, "Down the Rabbit Hole", which aired last Wednesday in the States (also streaming from the CBS site - I can't view it however, either it's not open outside of the US or it's way busy). There have been mutterings from the Second Life community about the show's extensive use of the (newly introduced and not universally used) voice chat. My feeling is you wouldn't expect a realistic portrayal forensic science from an episode of CSI, so surely asking for Second Life in all its lag, rezzing, getting bumped and getting ruthed glory is a bit much.

You can find the virtual CSI:NY home here, and if you already have SL set up you can you can find the slurl (= Second Life URL) here. Will newcomers be able to overcome both the excessive use of acronyms, the notoriously un-web 2.0 entry (ie it isn't the most intuitive environment), and the fact that SL is going to run your computer ragged if it isn't big and powerful?

Well, to get you started there's a bunch of video tutorials. If you have no interest in CSI whatsoever but are working in SL or helping people work in that environment, these are worth a peek. They've also got a quick start avatar creator (far better shape, hair and skin than the SL defaults). Helping lower the entry barrier is the first commercially licenced viewer, designed to make accessing and navigating SL simpler. There are a couple of in world greeters hanging around the main location to help people out as well, so if you do have any looming SL inductions CBS could potentially be doing you some big favors.

In world attractions include the props area & store (pretty interesting actually, but a shame they didn't throw in some poses for photographs - the huge advantage SL has over regular displays is that you can crawl all over the exhibits); some of New York; a crime lab; and a cool looking detective game that I haven't had the time to check out properly.

Speculation about somewhere in the region of a million new people checking out SL on the back of the episode are yet to be confirmed - it will be interesting what the final figures are, and also what happens to the percentage of the CSI fan community that end up sticking around.

On the fan-culture cross over theme, of course Henry Jenkins has already got it covered with an interview with two of the producers of the project for Electric Sheep, Damon Taylor and and Daniel Krueger.

4 bloggers blogging

Blogged already by James, Steve & Hayden, but I can't resist posting this photo from David Bryson's bloggers blogging slideshow - it's of Simon, me, Frances and Helen blogging after the Web Slam. Ah, happy days.

Open complimenting closed?

Interesting panel discussion over at Edition 13 of Austrailia's The Knowledge Tree. It's described as "Ewan MacIntosh, James Farmer, Brad Beach, Clint Smith, Peter Higgs, Frankie Forsyth and editor Jo Murray bring together a range of perspectives on the use of personal learning environments (PLEs) and learning management systems (LMS) to facilitate learning." Although I’m not entirely convinced that the panelists have a shared understanding of what PLE might actually be.

To my mind, Web2 tools and applications are currently being used to supplement the limitations of Learning Management Systems (LMS, or Virtual Learning Environments as we in the UK are used to calling them), rather than compliment them.

I'm sticking in my diagram here, because I think it's crucial to work forward from an idea of what personalisation might be:

LMS’s, as they currently stand, can deliver two elements of personalisation – they deal well with delivering. monitoring and recording institutional provision and proceedure, although you’d have to argue out on the ground how well they cope with customisation. Web2 apps offer a quick solution to the far more difficult issue of how institutions might engage with and support student-led participation. Just asking teachers to use both doesn’t give you anything like a PLE – it gives you a centralized, official and institutionally controlled and determined environment running alongside web-based, mainly commercial sites which support social media. Brad Breach characterizes a PLE in this way - as something distinct from and separate to a CMS.

Ewan MacIntosh confuses me a bit – he says in his opening that Scotland doesn’t use LMS and therefore is bypassing “centrally controlled hierarchical ways of dispensing information to students outside the classroom”. Later on in the interview he mention’s Glow – a Scotland wide commercial intranet (it’s an RM product) “this means that every school from primary, early years right up through secondary, will have the same virtual learning environment as every other school in the country and they will have the same collaborative tools.” To me – this seems like the very weird way of facilitating personalisation, let alone bypassing centralisation, unless the Glow VLE has secret abilities to intergrate with other systems I’m currently unaware of.

His definition of a PLE is also slightly odd – locating its ownership and responsibility entirely with the learner, rather than within a network of formal and informal relationships. I’m not sure what role he then sees for education in supporting PLE’s, or how learners would make use of PLE’s in terms of evaluation, assessment and accreditation.

James raises some really excellent points, and he also importantly draws attention to the role of identity and ownership in young peoples online presence, which is otherwise missing from a largely teacher-centered debate.

I was slightly alarmed that Peter Higgs doesn’t think that vocational education students would need a PLE, although it’s kind of interesting that he perceives a PLE to be fundamentally about reading and writing, rather than including learner selected elements which might include audio and visual.

Jean Baudrillard, 20 June 1929 - 6 March 2007

"The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations,in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988)

Trevor Norris: hannah arendt and jean baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society
Douglas Kellner: Jean Baudrillard After Modernity: Provocations On A Provocateur and Challenge
Edward Scheer: “The most delicate of operations”: Baudrillard’s Photographic Abreactions

In Real Life

I’ve just been checking out Thomas Ryberg’s draft paper on Networked Identities, which in a very fitting way I found via a comment Thomas had left over on an Explode comment wall – he’d posted it over at his site in response to an Explode ‘friends nudge’ (basically, messaging to people on your friends list) from Stan Stanier asking for suggestions on explaining the benefits of social networking sites and practices to teaching/academic staff.

Well, here you go Stan, one example of the usefulness of semi-structured networking within and across networks on a plate ☺

Thomas’s article raised exactly the issues we’ve been tackling over at the Emerge project, particularly the limitations of community of practice theorising around online activities and associations, and the current turn towards thinking through network identities.

So far, so useful. However – I’m wrestling with one particularly (to me anyway) sticky related issue at the moment. I was at NESTA’s Uploading Innovation event (co-ordinated by Policy Unplugged) and in one of the breakouts one of the participants pointed out the futility of distinguishing between online and offline in terms of young peoples activity, since for many of them the two were perceived of and experienced as interdependent. No argument from me. However, I have a similar problem to Stan, in that I still need to articulate fields of activity to people whose experience of the internet and technology may be very much less network, or community, or socially based. I’ve been using ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as indicators – but I’m aware that this is a very geek-centric approach which may not sit well with people who don’t spent as much time online as I do. I really have a problem with (and so won’t use) the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ (real world, real life) as a distinction – even though the popularity of the acronym IRL (in real life) is notably on the rise. I’ve occasionally fallen back on referring to offline as 3D.

Presuming it’s not just me who has an issue, can I ask what everyone else’s thinking is? What your preferred or grudging used terminology has been? Is my dependence on dichotomies a bit pitiful? What do you use?   

Placeblogger

 
Center for Citizen Media luminary and Lisa Williams launched Placeblogger on January 1st, an OPLM directory of (predominantly, but not exclusively) US placeblogs. What's a placeblog? From the site FAQ:

"A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place"

I took my son to the Leicester in Cardboard last year, a genius exhibition put together by Leicester based art collective DOT, which pretty much recreated Leicester in cardboard. We very much enjoyed acting like Godzilla amongst a mini-version of child's hometown, but my favorite part had to be the Royal Infirmary (birthplace of child) which was covered in visitors tales of their own and others pain (most of which were pretty hilarious). I know there are a few projects around which are investigating innovative ways of creating (and redefining) local histories, narratives and networks - the most interesting of these are using various forms of geotagging and MoSoSo - Mobile Social Software. 

I'm kind of more interested in the social layers of space and place that might result from placeblogging, but I like the concept of placeblogging as a specialized form of activity, and I'd be interested to test out the different kinds of ways it could be used within communities. & if someone entertaining enough started blogging about my area, I'd certainly be a regular reader. 

Jay Rosen, a site advisor on the Placeblogger launch

From the 7 August 2006 Citizen Journalism Unconference:
Lisa Williams Placeblogs session notes

Lisa Williams panel overview from the 5 October 2006 Citizens Media Summit II